“Oh, look!” she says, changing the subject. “It’s Lottie’s favorite song. We have to dance.” Over the speaker system, “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon is playing.
“But no one’s dancing!” Josie laughs. She’s right. The bar is packed but everyone is either sitting at tables or standing in their own small clusters.
“Well, then we have to be the trendsetters,” Rose declares. “You know, in some countries it’s illegal to sit down during a Carly Simon song.”
Josie shrugs and gets up, and without another thought, the two of them begin twirling each other around, circling the bar. A few sailors nod appreciatively as they dance through the crowd.
“Come on, Lily. Join us!” Mom does an elaborate moonwalk in my direction. I can’t help but laugh at how ridiculous they look.
“Fine, fine,” I give in, joining them.
We spin together in a practiced move we’ve had down since I was a little girl: the pretzel. My mom would build a fort in the living room and pretend we were camping outside with lanterns. She hung glow-in-the-dark stars from the ceiling. At eight o’clock, there would be s’mores melted over oven burners until they were blackened. At ten o’clock, we would watchDancing with the Starsand imitate the contestants.
The weight in my chest from the Henry sighting momentarily lightens, and my heart unclenches as we sing along to the song.
“Hey, how about I step in and give you a proper dancing partner?” A man appears behind us, tapping Rose on the shoulder.
It’s the guy from the bar, the younger one who laughed at me. He makes a disgusting winking motion, the left side of his mouth pulled upward like an invisible fishhook is attached to it. He boxes me out, grabbing my mom by the waist and stepping on her slipper.
Rose jolts back a step. “Oh, that’s sweet but I’m old enough to be your mother.” She wiggles out of his grasp, trying to disentangle herself without being rude.
This is Rose’s fatal flaw; she’s always so worried about hurting someone else, she makes herself uncomfortable.
“I assure you, you do not look like my mother.”
From behind him, the sound of his cronies laughing. The older man, the one who asked out Rose, is nowhere to be seen. Maybe he went off to the bathroom or to another bar on the wharf. I wonder if he would disapprove, step in.
Rose gingerly removes the guy’s hand from her hip like she is removing a leech. “I’m dancing with my daughter tonight.”
She pinches my cheeks and wraps an arm around my shoulders, and we turn to spin away from him.
I’m still heartbroken, still a mess, and I can tell the bruises from my fall at the grocery store are already beginning to form—another physical reminder of Henry—but in this moment, I feel blessed. I’m lucky, I think. I’m lucky, and life cannot be so bad if I am so lucky as to still be here, dancing with my mom.
The man looks from me to Rose and back again as we twirl away, beyond his reach.
Chapter FiveRose
May 29
The birds beat me to the punch the next morning. I can hear their chirping as the morning light trickles in.
There must be a robin’s nest outside. Lottie used to keep a bird-watching book on the living room coffee table. She would draw the birds she noticed in the garden, chronicling their colors and feathers, and including a list of interesting facts about the species in the margins. Lily and I used to love scrolling through the book every now and again, marveling at Lottie’s talent, those bright shades and sharp, clean lines.
Lottie said that after my mother’s death, she appeared to her as a blue jay, which always struck me as odd seeing as how I both couldn’t imagine my mother as a bird for obvious reasons and have also heard that blue jays have a sort of negative reputation for being aggressive.
But Lottie believed in stuff like that—past lives, reincarnation, marriage—the more outrageous, the better.
“People are so quick to limit themselves,” she would say. “It is easier to shrink the world than it is to expand your mind to wonder.”
Lottie said profound statements like that in complete, eloquent sentences, and then a minute later, as if a spell had been broken, she would laugh at herself and shrug.
“Well, what do I know!” she would say, surrendering her philosophy to a small smile.
Lily and I called these moments of profound wisdom “Lottie-isms.” They became our guiding principles.
I often wonder if the bird-watching book is what first sparked Lily’s love for art: all those hours watching, mesmerized as Lottie created something out of nothing, as if by magic. Drawing was never Lottie’s main passion—she had wanted to be a writer when she was a girl—but she had an eye for it nonetheless.
It’s seven a.m., and I’m sure Lily is still asleep. She never wakes up before ten on the weekends. I’m the opposite. The early morning is when I feel most at peace. Before the rest of the island awakens, Nantucket is mine and mine alone.
